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Governing drought resilience: farmers' economic rationality, social learning and diffusion of adaptation strategies to global environmental change

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... Having established vulnerability thresholds which could potentially pave the way for more informed M&EW systems, a key aspect of DrIVER will be translating these outcomes into management practice in the future. Research elsewhere in water managing and drought (e.g., Wilder et al. 2010;Duinen et al. 2012) suggests that social learning processes offer a way to engage stakeholders in transformative learning processes about existing concepts, experiences and methods for drought management. Although they are inevitably a simplification of reality, strategy games (e.g., Toth & Hizsnyik 2008) provide one way to learn about existing framings of drought, policy and practices and to help integrate intangible and non-quantifiable factors into strategic planning. ...
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Monitoring and Early-Warning (M&EW) systems are crucial for reducing societal vulnerability to drought. While there are a range of extant M&EW systems globally , such systems are typically based on physical (hydro-climatic) indicators, and they have rarely been linked to societal or environmental impacts. This is the starting point for the international, transdisciplinary project DrIVER (Drought Impacts and Vulnerability thresholds in monitoring and Early warning research). This paper introduces the DrIVER project and presents early research highlights including a review of current M&EW capacities and knowledge gaps on the three continents, preliminary results of indicator-to-impact analyses and an overview of the novel social learning framework being developed by the project.
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